"Like what?"
Serena shrugged. "She didn't say."
Stride chewed on this idea and didn't reply. He didn't like where any of this was going.
"But officially, you don't know about this, okay?" Serena repeated. "Maggie didn't want me to tell you."
He nodded. "She could use your help, Serena. She's going to need someone to investigate her side of what happened, and it can't be me. I can't be seen giving her any special treatment."
"I'll do what I can."
Serena hadn't joined the police force in Duluth. Stride supervised the city's detectives, and the employment lawyers frowned on nepotism. Instead, she had obtained her state license as a private investigator and begun struggling to find work. So far, her projects mostly involved plowing through trade journals and attending industry conventions to unearth competitive intelligence for a few Duluth-based start-ups. He knew the assignments left her bored and restless. She was a cop at heart, and she missed the street.
"I've got a new client meeting today," Serena added.
"Oh?"
"Dan Erickson wants to hire me."
"Dan?" Stride retorted. "Why the hell does he want you?"
Serena arched her eyebrows in offense. "Excuse me?"
"You know what I mean."
"He said my police background was a plus," Serena said.
"Except you live with me. That should be a big minus for Dan."
Dan Erickson was the county attorney and chief prosecutor for the region. He blamed Stride for the media fallout over a botched trial that had cost him a statewide election as attorney general. He was now widely considered damaged goods in Minnesota politics, and it was an open secret that he resented being stuck in the north woods of Duluth and was looking for a way out.
"You might want to think twice about this, Serena," he cautioned her.
"I can't say no. This is a big break for me."
He heard the stubborn resolve in her voice and knew her mind was already made up.
"You can't trust him."
Serena shrugged. "Dan can open doors for me all over the state." She added, "Besides, I don't trust any of my clients."
"Do you know what he wants?" Stride asked.
"No, he wouldn't talk about it on the phone. He asked me not to tell you anything about it."
"But you're telling me anyway."
"It's in the box."
They had struggled to find a way to work through the secrets they both had to share, without creating personal or professional problems for either of them. The reality was that they needed each other. Stride wanted her input on investigations because she was one of the most experienced detectives in the city, but her contributions had to be confidential and unofficial. Serena in turn wanted to get Stride's bounce on her own assignments, without worrying that anything she told him would wind up in a police file. So they invented the box. When they wanted to share information privately with each other, it went in the box.
"He'll make a pass at you," Stride added, smiling.
"He makes a pass at everyone."
"That's Dan."
"Why does Lauren put up with it? She's the one with the money."
"Dan and Lauren are all about power, not sex. If Lauren cared about Dan's affairs, she'd have cut him loose long ago."
"Spoken like a man," Serena said. "So what do you think Dan wants?"
"He probably needs to dig up dirt on a political opponent."
"Yeah, that was my guess. The legislature is back in session soon."
"Just make sure he doesn't hang you out to dry," Stride said. "For Dan, everyone around him is expendable. I've been there."
"I can take care of myself."
Serena closed her eyes and lifted her chin to let the icy wind strike her face. When she did that, you didn't argue with her.
Stride knew she had survived a long time on her own and was fiercely determined to make it here without his help. He didn't bother warning her that Duluth could be as extreme and cruel in its own way as Las Vegas. All he needed to do was look at the great expanse of the lake to remember that one person alone was pretty small in this part of the world. No matter how strong you were, there were things around here that were stronger.
5
Serena climbed the steps toward the county courthouse for her meeting with Dan Erickson and felt an odd sensation dogging her again, as it had for weeks. Uneasiness settled over her, and she stopped dead in her tracks. The feeling blinked out of the gray morning like a neon sign in her head, broadcasting the same word.
Danger.
She waited on the top step of the garden with her back to the courthouse, studying the comings and goings in the government plaza. A stony-eyed statue of a centurion towered behind her, guarding the three historic buildings clustered around the park. City Hall, where Jonny worked, was on her left. The federal building was directly opposite, on her right. All three government buildings were austere monuments from the 1920s, built of sand-colored granite blocks. Cars were parked in the slush around the circular driveway, and people hurried up the sidewalk, tramping through the cold in their winter coats. No one looked at her. She surveyed the windows in the neighboring media buildings one by one, then examined the street, her eyes moving from car to car.
A television truck with a satellite dish on its roof. A purple van from a computer repair shop. A delivery truck from Twin Ports Catering. A police car.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Serena shrugged off the feeling and blamed it on the ugliness of January. It wasn't the cold that she found hardest to get used to living in Duluth. It was the deathly pallor of the city at this time of year. Days would go by, sometimes weeks, with only the same charcoal mass of clouds overhead. Winter felt like a long, cheerless twilight, full of somber faces and ominous skies. Those were the times when she felt a sharp pang of longing for the desert with its sunshine and energy.
But for all that, she liked it here.
Her old home was barren compared to this ever-changing landscape. The Duluth summer had been cool and glorious. The fall, with its palette of reds and yellows stretching for miles on the trees, had awakened a strange, uplifting sadness in her when she passed through the rain of dying leaves. Even the winter was beautiful, with something spiritual about the severity of cold and clouds that made her live inside her mind.
She liked that she stood out in this city. She was tall and athletic, with full, highlighted raven hair. In Las Vegas, she had regularly been mistaken for a showgirl, but statuesque beauties were a dime a dozen in that city. Not in Duluth. She enjoyed the stares. She liked watching men melt. It empowered her and gave her the confidence that she was up to the challenge of making a new life for herself in a new place.
She liked what being here did for Jonny, too. He was home, in a cold place, in the shadow of the lake. Serena found that her love for him had deepened and matured this past year, as she got to know him in a more intimate way. Their attraction had been electric and physical in the beginning, but the longer she lived with him, the more she had come to respect his decency and humanity. It also aroused her no end that he thought she was one of the sharpest detectives he had ever known.
But she couldn't escape the sense of unease that twisted her insides now. The sensation of eyes watching her under a microscope.
Danger.
She had learned to listen to her intuition. Back in Vegas, there had been a stretch of weeks when she got the same feeling, that something was wrong, that she was sharing her life with a secret stalker. Later, she discovered that a predator named Tommy Luck really had been watching her all that time, and she wound up with a narrow escape.
That was then, she thought, and this is now. Tommy was history. The past was behind her.
Maybe it was simply that she couldn't escape her demons so readily. She was still haunted by memories of her teenage years in Phoenix, before she ran away to Las Vegas. Her mother had descended into a life-stealing addiction to cocaine and begun living with a sadistic drug dealer named Blue Dog who used Serena as his personal whore. She had fought long and hard to get past the helplessness of those days and still saw a psychiatrist every month to help her cope. It was over, but it was never really over. It only took a strange, disconnected sensation of danger to reawaken the scared child.